Meeting and Maintaining Acceptable Standards

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We recently modified our Basic Pistol 2 course to offer a two-hour version that serves 3 functions:

Basic Pistol 2

The BP2 course is the class we recommend for people that know how to shoot, but have never had a formal handgun course where fundamentals were taught in depth, and/or have never shot on a structured firing line running timed drills. Many years ago we came up with a list of questions students could ask themselves to determine whether they would benefit from attending the course:

  1. Can you score 90% on the Texas LTC shooting test?
  2. Do you understand how your pistol works? (For example understanding cocked and locked carry for a 1911, or using the decocker and firing DA for the first shot with a DA/SA style pistol).
  3. Do you do any “dry fire” practice with your pistol at home?
  4. Have you practiced starting at a ready position, finger off trigger, and getting the gun quickly to the target and firing?
  5. Are your grip and gunhandling skills up to date?
  6. Do you really know what your trigger finger is doing before, during and after each shot?
  7. Do you follow through after the shot is fired?

The vast majority of carry permit holders answer “no” to several (or all) of these questions. A well trained armed citizen should be able to answer “yes” to all of them. The primary objectives of the course are to teach those skills.

Online LTC Completion

Texas now allows carry permit applicants to do their classroom training online, needing only a short in person course (minimum of 1 hour classroom, minimum of 50 round shooting test on the range, with range test time NOT counting as part of the 1 hour classroom training).

In the two-hour version of the course, we spend one hour covering the required classroom material, and the second hour is 100 rounds of shooting: 50 rounds of drills to practice and develop skills necessary to perform well on the LTC test, and then the LTC test itself. By adding an extra 30 minutes to the state minimum, we provide significantly more instruction and improve student skill. The full 100 round program includes the first 4 drills from our Top 10.

LTC Refresher / Annual Tune Up

The two hour course can also be used as an annual tune up for students at any level. For those that have gone beyond the state minimum and had formal training in how to draw from concealment or open carry, by changing the state mandated B-27 target for our KRT-2 target, and having the shooter run the LTC starting each string drawing from concealment, making two of the 5-shot strings mandatory head shots, they can join lower level students on the firing line as they run the state test, but get much more training value from the more challenging version of the course.

I recently shot the Texas LTC test this way using our KRT-2 target. It’s considerably smaller than the B-27. The videos below show the KRT-2 pasted on top of a B-27 for scale. Only the grey and white parts of the KRT-2 count as hits. Anything in or outside the black border is considered a miss. The white section is the “X ring” with the grey area counted as an “acceptable” hit.

Firearms training is not a “one and done” thing, although many carry permit holders treat it that way. Taking a short course to verify that your skills are maintained at a reasonable level is a good thing to do each year, whether you do that by taking our 2 hour course, shoot an IDPA, USPSA or Steel Challenge match, or run some structured, timed drills in your own practice time.